Lee's Summit angler Larry Raffurty, 73, holds the 51-inch muskellunge he caught at Fellows Lake a week ago. The fish was longer than the state record, but not as heavy. / Fellows Lake Marina

Lake Life this week heads up to Fellows Lake north of Springfield, where Larry Raffurty recently set the angling community abuzz by landing the longest muskellunge ever caught in Missouri.

If you haven’t heard of Fellows Lake, mark it down as a place to check out this summer, both for its boating and fishing opportunities.

The toothy fish was 4 feet, 3 inches long — a full inch and a half more than the current Missouri record fish that was caught in Lake of the Ozarks. But since it probably had just laid a big mass of eggs in March, Raffurty’s fish weighed 35 pounds, 7 ounces, well short of the 41-pound, 2-ounce record fish that had six pounds of eggs inside when it was caught in 1981.

Raffurty’s muskie won’t go in the record books, but it’s what he did after landing it that makes this story even more interesting. A dedicated muskie fisherman for several years, the Lee’s Summit angler regularly fishes the Missouri lakes — Pomme de Terre and Fellows particularly — where state conservation crews have stocked the big predatory fish for years.

Using 80-pound test line and a 125-pound test monofilament leader to thwart wickedly sharp muskie teeth, Raffurty said he was trolling a “big, ugly crank bait, a 10-inch Grandma” when the fish hit the lure about 10 feet deep in 20 feet of water.

Boating solo, he fought the fish though several powerful runs for about 15 minutes before it came to the surface.

“I got up to see her and I thought, boy, I wish someone was with me to help me out,” he said.

Sensing he might have a state record muskie, he kept the fish in the water in a large net and slowly motored to the Fellows Lake Marina, where he fanned water into its gills to keep it alive until Missouri Conservation Department officials arrived about an hour later to check out the catch.

Dave Woods, MDC fisheries management biologist, said he used a tube cradle and hanging scale to weigh it as fast as possible to reduce stress on the fish. It was very quickly evident the long and lean muskie wasn’t close to breaking the state weight record.

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“If he had caught it in March before it laid eggs, instead of the end of May, it probably would have broken the state record,” Woods said.

He estimated Raffurty’s muskie was 10 or 12 years old and noted they can live up to 20 years or more. “They keep growing until they die,” he said.

Raffurty said his goal all along was to release the fish alive back into Fellows Lake. He and a friend spent nearly four hours trying to rehabilitate the muskie as it floated in the water. At one point they even tried sticking the marina’s minnow-tank hose that pumps cold water from deeper in the lake into the muskie’s mouth to try oxygenate the fish.

They released it several times but the fish kept surfacing, eventually belly up.

“It’s sad,” Raffurty said. “We try not to kill any of them, but just catch and release them. I’ve caught bigger fish in the ocean, but for freshwater, this was a fish of a lifetime.”

A member of Show-Me Muskies, Raffurty is among a dedicated group of muskellunge anglers who voluntarily report details of every fish they catch to state conservation officials.

Woods said their data helps MDC track the health of the muskie fisheries. MDC stocks 820 muskies about 14 inches long in Fellows Lake every fall. He hopes to get a few bones from Raffurty’s fish to accurately determine how old it was. Like trees, certain fish bones show rings for each year of growth.

Visitors to Fellows Lake Marina eventually will be able to see Raffurty’s near-record fish. It’s in the process of being mounted and will be displayed at the marina when it’s done.